New book by biographer Walter Isaacson explores the billionaire’s leadership style and ‘demon mode’
4 min
Simply put: Elon Musk can be a real jerk.
And that has probably helped and hurt him in business, according to a new biography by Walter Isaacson.
In “Elon Musk,” out Tuesday, Isaacson puts forth the idea of “demon mode” to explain the temperamental impulses behind some of the tycoon’s successes—and setbacks. But it isn’t just demon mode that has fuelled his rise. Isaacson details other teachable ways the billionaire’s methods have helped make him the world’s richest man.
Both sides of Musk are sure to become part of B-school lore for a new generation of would-be entrepreneurs and business managers picking and choosing which traits and tactics to emulate.
Isaacson had previously made the concept of the “reality distortion field” popular with his bestselling 2011 book about Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and his ability to bend perception to motivate others.
Demon mode was on display in 2018 as Musk struggled to ramp up production of Tesla’s Model 3 sedan, which nearly destroyed the electric-car company and which the CEO dubbed production hell.
That experience through hell, the book says, also helped Musk shape five commandments for how he wants problems solved by his workers across his companies, from rocket maker SpaceX to social-media platform X, formerly Twitter.
Musk, in the book, calls the framework for problem solving “the algorithm.” In short, Musk urges his employees to:
“His executives sometimes move their lips and mouth the words, like they would chant the liturgy along with their priest,” Isaacson wrote of Musk’s mantra.
In the book, Musk acknowledges he talks about the approach often. “I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Musk is quoted as saying. “But I think it’s helpful to say it to an annoying degree.”
The approach builds off a long-held method for problem solving touted by Musk called first principles, a reasoning that breaks tasks into their very basics without simply reverting to what has been done before.
“The algorithm is a five-step process for not only making good products and designing good products, but manufacturing them,” Isaacson said in an interview Monday.
“It begins with first principles. He says, question every requirement, and, by first principles he means, look down at the physics. If somebody says, no, we can’t build it at this price, he says, tell me how much the materials cost. Tell me exactly what’s involved here and then tell me you can or can’t do it.”
There are other lessons in the book that Musk has long practiced, such as never asking an employee to do something you aren’t willing to do (hence his sleeping on factory floors), hiring employees based on their attitude, and saying “it’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong.”
Telling Musk bad news, however, has been seen by some employees as dangerous to one’s career.
“One of his problems is people sometimes are afraid to tell him the bad news,” Isaacson said. “Those who succeed around Musk are those who figure out you got to give him the bad news even if it’s going to result in some unpleasant scenes.”
Their fear is often rooted in demon mode.
Claire Boucher, known as the musician Grimes and the mother of three of Musk’s children, coined the term in an interview with Isaacson.
“Demon mode is when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain,” Boucher said in the book. “Demon mode,” she added, “causes a lot of chaos but it also gets s— done.”
And Musk has gotten a lot done, helping usher in the electric-car era as Tesla chief executive and igniting the commercial space race with SpaceX, which he founded. His messy stewardship of X, however, is testing public perception of his business genius.
Isaacson, who shadowed Musk for two years in reporting the book, saw demon mode in person several times along with other personalities that he described as ranging from silly to charming. He suggests the roots of the dark clouds come from the 52-year-old’s childhood in South Africa.
“It’s almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where a cloud comes over and he gets into a trance and he can just be tough in a cold way,” Isaacson said. “He never gets really angry, never gets that physical, but coldly brutal to people and he almost doesn’t remember afterwards what he’s done. Sometimes I’ll say, why did you say that to that person? And he’ll look at me blankly as if he didn’t quite remember what happened while he was in demon mode.”
In one instance, Isaacson described seeing demon mode emerge when Musk saw SpaceX’s launchpad in South Texas empty late one evening.
“He orders a hundred people to come in from different parts of SpaceX from Florida, California so they can all work for 24 hours a day getting this thing done even though there was no need to,” Isaacson said.
Such surges seem to play in tandem to Musk’s need for drama.
“He is a drama magnet,” Musk’s younger brother, Kimbal, said in the book. “That’s his compulsion, the theme of his life.”
Isaacson cautions that readers shouldn’t come away thinking they can be just like Musk and automatically succeed. Rather, he said, readers should see both how leaders such as Musk and the late Jobs were effective and also take away cautionary tales.
“You don’t have to be this mean,” he said.
Still, throughout his book, Isaacson chases the question of whether Musk could be successful any other way.
“I try to show how that’s one of the strands in a fabric and as Shakespeare said, we’re molded out of our faults,” Isaacson said. “If we pull that strand out, you might not get the whole cloth of Elon Musk.”
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Subsidised minivans, no income taxes: Countries have rolled out a range of benefits to encourage bigger families, with no luck
7 min
Imagine if having children came with more than $150,000 in cheap loans, a subsidised minivan and a lifetime exemption from income taxes.
Would people have more kids? The answer, it seems, is no.
These are among the benefits—along with cheap child care, extra vacation and free fertility treatments—that have been doled out to parents in different parts of Europe, a region at the forefront of the worldwide baby shortage. Europe’s overall population shrank during the pandemic and is on track to contract by about 40 million by 2050, according to United Nations statistics.
Birthrates have been falling across the developed world since the 1960s. But the decline hit Europe harder and faster than demographers expected—a foreshadowing of the sudden drop in the U.S. fertility rate in recent years.
Reversing the decline in birthrates has become a national priority among governments worldwide, including in China and Russia , where Vladimir Putin declared 2024 “the year of the family.” In the U.S., both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have pledged to rethink the U.S.’s family policies . Harris wants to offer a $6,000 baby bonus. Trump has floated free in vitro fertilisation and tax deductions for parents.
Europe and other demographically challenged economies in Asia such as South Korea and Singapore have been pushing back against the demographic tide with lavish parental benefits for a generation. Yet falling fertility has persisted among nearly all age groups, incomes and education levels. Those who have many children often say they would have them even without the benefits. Those who don’t say the benefits don’t make enough of a difference.
Two European countries devote more resources to families than almost any other nation: Hungary and Norway. Despite their programs, they have fertility rates of 1.5 and 1.4 children for every woman, respectively—far below the replacement rate of 2.1, the level needed to keep the population steady. The U.S. fertility rate is 1.6.
Demographers suggest the reluctance to have kids is a fundamental cultural shift rather than a purely financial one.
“I used to say to myself, I’m too young. I have to finish my bachelor’s degree. I have to find a partner. Then suddenly I woke up and I was 28 years old, married, with a car and a house and a flexible job and there were no more excuses,” said Norwegian Nancy Lystad Herz. “Even though there are now no practical barriers, I realised that I don’t want children.”
Both Hungary and Norway spend more than 3% of GDP on their different approaches to promoting families—more than the amount they spend on their militaries, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Hungary says in recent years its spending on policies for families has exceeded 5% of GDP. The U.S. spends around 1% of GDP on family support through child tax credits and programs aimed at low-income Americans.
Hungary’s subsidised housing loan program has helped almost 250,000 families buy or upgrade their homes, the government says. Orsolya Kocsis, a 28-year-old working in human resources, knows having kids would help her and her husband buy a larger house in Budapest, but it isn’t enough to change her mind about not wanting children.
“If we were to say we’ll have two kids, we could basically buy a new house tomorrow,” she said. “But morally, I would not feel right having brought a life into this world to buy a house.”
Promoting baby-making, known as pro natalism, is a key plank of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ’s broader populist agenda . Hungary’s biennial Budapest Demographic Summit has become a meeting ground for prominent conservative politicians and thinkers. Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and JD Vance, Trump’s vice president pick, have lauded Orbán’s family policies.
Orbán portrays having children inside what he has called a “traditional” family model as a national duty, as well as an alternative to immigration for growing the population. The benefits for child-rearing in Hungary are mostly reserved for married, heterosexual, middle-class couples. Couples who divorce lose subsidised interest rates and in some cases have to pay back the support.
Hungary’s population, now less than 10 million, has been shrinking since the 1980s. The country is about the size of Indiana.
“Because there are so few of us, there’s always this fear that we are disappearing,” said Zsuzsanna Szelényi, program director at the CEU Democracy Institute and author of a book on Orbán.
Hungary’s fertility rate collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union and by 2010 was down to 1.25 children for every woman. Orbán, a father of five, and his Fidesz party swept back into power that year after being ousted in the early 2000s. He expanded the family support system over the next decade.
Hungary’s fertility rate rose to 1.6 children for every woman in 2021. Ivett Szalma, an associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest, said that like in many other countries, women in Hungary who had delayed having children after the global financial crisis were finally catching up.
Then progress stalled. Hungary’s fertility rate has fallen for the past two years. Around 51,500 babies have been born there this year through August, a 10% drop compared with the same period last year. Many Hungarian women cite underfunded public health and education systems and difficulties balancing work and family as part of their hesitation to have more children.
Anna Nagy, a 35-year-old former lawyer, had her son in January 2021. She received a loan of about $27,300 that she didn’t have to start paying back until he turned 3. Nagy had left her job before getting pregnant but still received government-funded maternity payments, equal to 70% of her former salary, for the first two years and a smaller amount for a third year.
She used to think she wanted two or three kids, but now only wants one. She is frustrated at the implication that demographic challenges are her responsibility to solve. Economists point to increased immigration and a higher retirement age as other offsets to the financial strains on government budgets from a declining population.
“It’s not our duty as Hungarian women to keep the nation alive,” she said.
Hungary is especially generous to families who have several children, or who give birth at younger ages. Last year, the government announced it would restrict the loan program used by Nagy to women under 30. Families who pledge to have three or more children can get more than $150,000 in subsidised loans. Other benefits include a lifetime exemption from personal taxes for mothers with four or more kids, and up to seven extra annual vacation days for both parents.
Under another program that’s now expired, nearly 30,000 families used a subsidy to buy a minivan, the government said.
Critics of Hungary’s family policies say the money is wasted on people who would have had large families anyway. The government has also been criticised for excluding groups such as the minority Roma population and poorer Hungarians. Bank accounts, credit histories and a steady employment history are required for many of the incentives.
Orbán’s press office didn’t respond to requests for comment. Tünde Fűrész, head of a government-backed demographic research institute, disagreed that the policies are exclusionary and said the loans were used more heavily in economically depressed areas.
Government programs weren’t a determining factor for Eszter Gerencsér, 37, who said she and her husband always wanted a big family. They have four children, ages 3 to 10.
They received about $62,800 in low-interest loans through government programs and $35,500 in grants. They used the money to buy and renovate a house outside of Budapest. After she had her fourth child, the government forgave $11,000 of the debt. Her family receives a monthly payment of about $40 a month for each child.
Most Hungarian women stay home with their children until they turn 2, after which maternity payments are reduced. Publicly run nurseries are free for large families like hers. Gerencsér worked on and off between her pregnancies and returned full-time to work, in a civil-service job, earlier this year.
She still thinks Hungarian society is stacked against mothers and said she struggled to find a job because employers worried she would have to take lots of time off.
The country’s international reputation as family-friendly is “what you call good marketing,” she said.
Norway has been incentivising births for decades with generous parental leave and subsidised child care. New parents in Norway can share nearly a year of fully paid leave, or around 14 months at 80% pay. More than three months are reserved for fathers to encourage more equal caregiving. Mothers are entitled to take at least an hour at work to breast-feed or pump.
The government’s goal has never been explicitly to encourage people to have more children, but instead to make it easier for women to balance careers and children, said Trude Lappegard, a professor who researches demography at the University of Oslo. Norway doesn’t restrict benefits for unmarried parents or same-sex couples.
Its fertility rate of 1.4 children per woman has steadily fallen from nearly 2 in 2009. Unlike Hungary, Norway’s population is still growing for now, due mostly to immigration.
“It is difficult to say why the population is having fewer children,” Kjersti Toppe, the Norwegian Minister of Children and Families, said in an email. She said the government has increased monthly payments for parents and has formed a committee to investigate the baby bust and ways to reverse it.
More women in Norway are childless or have only one kid. The percentage of 45-year-old women with three or more children fell to 27.5% last year from 33% in 2010. Women are also waiting longer to have children—the average age at which women had their first child reached 30.3 last year. The global surge in housing costs and a longer timeline for getting established in careers likely plays a role, researchers say. Older first-time mothers can face obstacles: Women 35 and older are at higher risk of infertility and pregnancy complications.
Gina Ekholt, 39, said the government’s policies have helped offset much of the costs of having a child and allowed her to maintain her career as a senior adviser at the nonprofit Save the Children Norway. She had her daughter at age 34 after a round of state-subsidised IVF that cost about $1,600. She wanted to have more children but can’t because of fertility issues.
She receives a monthly stipend of about $160 a month, almost fully offsetting a $190 monthly nursery fee.
“On the economy side, it hasn’t made a bump. What’s been difficult for me is trying to have another kid,” she said. “The notion that we should have more kids, and you’re very selfish if you have only had one…those are the things that took a toll on me.”
Her friend Ewa Sapieżyńska, a 44-year-old Polish-Norwegian writer and social scientist with one son, has helped her see the upside of the one-child lifestyle. “For me, the decision is not about money. It’s about my life,” she said.
